SQL Server Heroes Unite Party is tonight, starting at 6:00 PM. Rushabh warned us: "If you drink a bit too much, you might go home with a tattoo." A Flock Of SQLs is playing. I can't wait. I wonder if they'll allow an picker to sit in on a tune? Maybe a little Southern Rock?

The New SQLPass

SQLPass finances are opening up. It's really cool to see PASS opening up about finances - this has been a consistent criticism and it's great to see the PASS Board responding. I won't bore you with the numbers. They're on the website.

Among the cool announcements today, I paid particular attention to the Hosted SQL Server 2008 trial - very cool! This allows to try out some cool features of SQL Server 2008 without having to install and configure it.

Tom's theme was moving Business Intelligence as a specialization to Business Intelligence for everyone by turning insight into action.

Bruno Aziza demonstrated a dashboard built with PerformancePoint Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and SQL Server. It included Outlook integration, Excel docs, and lots of other cool stuff integrated into a personal portal. Collaborative integration was also featured. Pretty cool stuff

The BI stack integrates spatial data and leverages collaboration in this context. "Continuous" is a key concept here: Continuous communication, Continuous metrics, all in near real-time. Tom's point to the PASS Summit 2008 attendees: This is built on SQL Server.

Carolyn's demo or Report Builder 2.0 was really cool, but I believe a lot of folks missed an important point: She was dragging and dropping metrics onto the design surface from a 1.8TB Analysis Server cube. And the data preview was refreshing in milliseconds! Very impressive!

The editors are improved and interactive - which will facilitate a nice productivity boost for developers. Gauges in the table - very cool, and an impromptu Undo demo - also very cool! The mini-trends are a really slick "quick" visualization element.

<Editorial>

There was some push-back from the relational folks to some comments (or interpretations of comments) from Tom about the importance of BI. Some of it is understandable. Some of it is not. The title of the keynote clearly identified the topic as Business Intelligence. That's what it was.

No one (no one I know of anyway), thinks BI is the end-all be-all. It's a tool in the toolbox. I mean, relational folks, you're not still in command-line, are you? Your tools have changed. BI actually builds on your systems. It's an application, pure and simple. To think of it in any other way is a mistake, in my opinion. It's an integrated app, mind you, and ever-more-coupled to your relational engine.

You can choose to ignore it. Personally, I don't think you'll need to know Business Intelligence to continue working in the database field. And you don't have to like it. Bashing it, though, is a mistake. In my opinion. Underestimating the value is a similar mistake. Just because you or I don't see all the value does not mean it's not there.

Me, I like to learn new stuff. You may not. That's cool. It's a big database world out there. Cool?</Editorial>

Insight into Action == More Productivity

Microsoft is leveraging Business Intelligence internally - from the Performance Warehouse to Enterprise Data Warehousing. The cool part? It all fits. This forms the basis of the new stuff. It's a constantly-evolving vision, somewhat realized as of 2008. But that's the way it will (and should) always be: the vision should evolve and ever be in a state of "partial realization".

Gemini and Donald Farmer

Under-the-desk apps can shut down companies. There is a widening gap between end users and IT needs. How to bridge the gap? Enter Gemini. Enlighten the application infrastructure; enable the end user to access data easily. The demo leverages SSAS as a service-provider for MOSS.

Donald demo'd a cool-looking Operations dashboard on the Gemini screen and drilled into some Sandbox portal visualizations. Very cool "chartlets" if you will. Nice drill-through into sub-dashboards.

There was an odd little bubble chart in the center of the demo screen. The odd part was the Play button beneath the visualization. And then Donald clicked it and wow - the bubbles (representing KPIs) went into motion! The animated graphs are awesome! Being able to visualize the data in this way added a depth to the data that's difficult to describe if you haven't seen it. The relationships between KPIs are clearly visible - and in a way I haven't seen before.

In addition, the security status report is a fantastic idea!

Once again, Donald Farmer has demonstrated landscape-changing technology for BI. ROI will come from gaining actionable insight in the context of the common user experience. MarketingSpeak? You bet. Accurate? You bet.

Comment Notification

Comments

I heard some of the same grumblings about this release focusing so much on BI. From what I'm hearing, it's from hard-core engine DBAs that manage a lot of instances and want to focus on engine performance, engine management and engine reliability. One of my customers in particular was so pissed off that he rescheduled his flight to leave the conference early.

I think that's extreme, and I think the reality is that engine performance, management and reliability isn't job one anymore because it doesn't sell databases. MSSQL isn't behind any of the other players in engine capabilities (with the possible exception of Oracle's RAC, depending on who you talk to).

And at the same time, MSSQL is way ahead of the other guys when it comes to the rest of the stack (ETL and BI) and I love that they're pouring on the coals. They have a serious edge here in usability for both developers and end users. I don't blame them for wanting to pursue that advantage.